​‘Bob Crow died despising what Labour Party had become’

Afshin Rattansi is a journalist, author of “The Dream of the Decade – the London Novels” and an RT Contributor. Afshin Rattansi began his journalism career on The (London) Guardian in the late 1980s as one of the newspaper’s youngest ever columnists. He went on to work for Britain’s Channel 4, BBC, Al Jazeera Arabic, CNN International and Bloomberg Television and many other media. In the run-up to the Lehman Brothers crash of 2008, he published a collection of four of his novels as “The Dream of the Decade – The London Novels.”
As US pressure increased on Iran, Afshin moved to Tehran to anchor the news on the new satellite TV channel, Press TV which was later banned in Britain. He set up Alternate Reality Productions in London in 2010 making Double Standards, a comedy satire show as well as other TV news commissions. His writing has also appeared in the New Statesman; Counterpunch; The Oldie; Plays and Players; Mitchell Beazley’s Encyclopaedia of 21st Century; The Journal of the British Astronomical Association; Association of Lloyd's Members Journal; Critical Quarterly; Makers of Modern Culture (Routledge, 2007); “Brought To Book” (Penguin, 1994); Flaunt; Attitude. He is a founder member of the Frontline Club in London and he won the Sony Award for outstanding contribution to international media in 2002.

In an age when there are few successful heroes willing to fight against neoliberalism, Britain’s Bob Crow stood apart.

He made the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport
Workers the fastest growing union in the UK, but when he gave his
last long form interview to me (for Going Underground on RT), it was clear that Crow’s
practical skills were rooted in the deepest of theoretical ideas
about how a society should function in the best interests of all.

Crow and his thousands of comrades had just used strike action to
win the right to negotiate over pay and conditions on London’s
Underground network and he was in bullish mood. He told us how,
at last, issues could be ironed out in a rational way instead of
as part of a direct class war with the government and management.
Ironically, we asked Crow to record some eulogies for politicians
he respected who were unwell. Who would have thought that he
would die so suddenly at the age of 52 of a reported heart
attack?

Like most workers’ leaders, he was demonized by the
tightly-controlled right wing press in Britain. Every time he
fought for his members, journalists and the commentariat
volunteered to defame him by almost any means necessary. That is
a testament to just how dangerous the establishment saw Crow,
just as they saw Arthur Scargill a generation ago.

Everything the establishment had in its power was thrown at
Scargill, to sabotage his attempt at preserving the most economic
coal in Europe. Today, Britain imports coal mined by children.
With Crow, attention in the media centered on the fact that he
lived in a council house despite his earnings. What those who
call themselves journalists in Britain didn’t understand was that
Crow favored public over private, society over atomized
individuals. Only a council house could be acceptable. Then they
attacked his salary, even though it was his thousands of members
who voted for him to earn in a year what a CEO of a nationalized
bank takes home in a month. Most recently, they had paparazzi
photograph him on holiday in Brazil - as if taking a holiday
before preparing for battle wasn’t a wise move.

Since the 1984 Miners’ Strike, Britain’s politicians have become
more subservient to the 1 percent management elite and that made
Crow all the more unique as a voice against prevailing ideas
about the organization of society. Our interview with Crow was
conducted at the RMT’s headquarters in London, in the center of a
toroid table around which the General Strike of 1926 was voted on
and around which the Labour Party was founded. He died despising
what the Labour Party had become - one deeply committed to the
Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s. The Labour Party he once fought
for now differs from the Tories by a few percentage points of GDP
when it comes to budget ambitions. More interesting to Crow was
the broad sweep of worker struggles. RMT HQ is adorned not just
by an alarming amount of Millwall Football memorabilia, it also
commemorates workers who died fighting fascism in Spain and those
fighting the US-backed coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

The RMT, under Bob Crow, severed links with the British Labour
party soon after it helped launch the catastrophic war on Iraq.
The Union had had ties with Labour for over a century. Crow was
preparing to stand as a candidate for a new party that would
fight the macro-level neoliberalism of the EU. He would have been
giving speeches in the coming weeks about the US-backed coup
d’état in Ukraine.

Crow believed in a great narrative of global history and
supported anti-imperialist movements around the world. He sought
a vanguard and said he was inspired by the spirit of the
Palestinian people who continue to fight despite all odds. He
said he wanted a wholesale revolution in Britain akin to the
revolution in Cuba.

One of Crow’s inspirations, Fidel Castro still survives amidst
Cuba’s on-going war against the biggest military power on earth
and Bob Crow is no more. But I think it’s a pretty good bet that
Crow will have inspired a new generation who will strive harder
for a society that is truly egalitarian, in effect a grander
class struggle than just one train or shipping strike.

Britain is in the throes of the greatest economic crisis since
the 1930s and unlike the 1 percent so memorably evoked by F Scott
Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, those inspired by Bob Crow will
beat on, boats against the current, borne forward ceaselessly
into the future.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.